Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: Quickly Updating Values.

Quickly Updating Values

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated June 6, 2020)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021


Many people use Excel to keep track of important information such as price sheets or cost tables. This data is then used to help calculate proposals or to figure out how much should be charged to customers. It is not uncommon to need to update information in these tables on a periodic basis. For instance, your company may decide that it will increase all prices in the company by ten percent this year.

If you have rather large pricing tables, you may not know the best way to update the prices by the ten percent. Obviously, you could make a secondary table and then base the information in that table on a formula, such as =B3 * 1.1. This is actually more work than is necessary, however. Excel provides a much quicker way to update values in a table by a uniform amount. Simply follow these steps:

  1. Select an empty cell, somewhere outside the range used by your pricing table.
  2. Enter the value 1.1 in the empty cell.
  3. With the cell selected, press Ctrl+C to copy its contents to the Clipboard.
  4. Select the entire pricing table. You should not select any headers or non-numeric information in the table.
  5. Display the Home tab of the ribbon.
  6. Click the down-arrow at the bottom of the Paste option (left side of the ribbon). Excel displays a drop-down list of pasting options.
  7. Choose the Paste Special option from the drop-down list. Excel displays the Paste Special dialog box. (See Figure 1.)
  8. Figure 1. The Paste Special dialog box.

  9. In the Operation area of the dialog box, make sure you select the Multiply option.
  10. Click on OK.
  11. Select the cell where you entered the value in step 2.
  12. Press the Delete key.

That's it! All the values in your pricing table now show a ten percent increase from their previous values.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (6137) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Quickly Updating Values.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

MORE FROM ALLEN

An Automatic Two Spaces after a Period

Should you put two spaces after a sentence or just one? Ask different people and you will get different answers. To Word ...

Discover More

Unselecting a Chart Item

When formatting a chart, you select elements and then change the properties of those elements until everything looks just ...

Discover More

Disabling Page Layout View

Excel allows you to display your workbooks using a couple of different views. If you want to disable one of the views, it ...

Discover More

Excel Smarts for Beginners! Featuring the friendly and trusted For Dummies style, this popular guide shows beginners how to get up and running with Excel while also helping more experienced users get comfortable with the newest features. Check out Excel 2019 For Dummies today!

More ExcelTips (ribbon)

Adjusting Formulas when Pasting

The Paste Special feature in Excel can be used to uniformly adjust values and formulas. This tip shows how powerful this ...

Discover More

Quickly Transposing Cells

If you want to turn a range of cells by 90 degrees within a worksheet, you need to understand how Excel can handle the ...

Discover More

Creating a Shortcut for Pasting Values

Excel's Paste Special command is used quite a bit. If you want to create some shortcuts for the command, here's some ways ...

Discover More
Subscribe

FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in ExcelTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."

View most recent newsletter.

Comments

If you would like to add an image to your comment (not an avatar, but an image to help in making the point of your comment), include the characters [{fig}] (all 7 characters, in the sequence shown) in your comment text. You’ll be prompted to upload your image when you submit the comment. Maximum image size is 6Mpixels. Images larger than 600px wide or 1000px tall will be reduced. Up to three images may be included in a comment. All images are subject to review. Commenting privileges may be curtailed if inappropriate images are posted.

What is two more than 2?

There are currently no comments for this tip. (Be the first to leave your comment—just use the simple form above!)


This Site

Got a version of Excel that uses the ribbon interface (Excel 2007 or later)? This site is for you! If you use an earlier version of Excel, visit our ExcelTips site focusing on the menu interface.

Newest Tips
Subscribe

FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in ExcelTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."

(Your e-mail address is not shared with anyone, ever.)

View the most recent newsletter.